Verbosio progress, April 4, 2013: Return of the screenshots

With college and a full-time job, I’ve been rather busy. But I still find time to make small improvements. I’m continuing to work on my experimental XML editor, Verbosio, from the ground level. I realized a couple months ago that I really needed some pictures to show where I was at.

This is work from my Verbosio Templates subproject, which currently requires Mozilla Firefox 22 (currently in Aurora).

The first image looks like a very cheap copy of DOM Inspector – and it is.

A XML document generated from DOMParser

The second image is little better, until you realize that the entire DOM implementation is entirely in JavaScript.

A DOM-like tree constructed from Simple API for XML (SAX) and pure JavaScript

There are a couple more differences – for instance, this latter view includes a XML declaration. In the DOM specification, it shouldn’t be there, because the XML declaration is not recognized as a node at all. But if you’re going to edit a document that already exists and already has that declaration, as a set of DOM nodes, you should preserve that declaration. So my non-standard DOM implementation makes it a processing instruction.

Both trees, by the way, are also using my TreeViews.jsm module. I hope this module can be helpful in building XUL trees from object models like the DOM.

I’m also starting work on a WebGL-based view of the same trees, where nodes and their descendants are laid out in two dimensions as cubes, in a tree hierarchy like this. WebGL is a three-dimensional context, though, so you may be wondering what the third dimension is for. Initially, I’ll draw attributes as cubes above the elements they belong to. That part shouldn’t be hard – and it should be very doable by anyone proficient with WebGL, inside an ordinary web page. I’d love it if someone beat me to it.